Safety

1.General Lab Safety Rules

All team members follow the general lab safety rules and receive safety training before experiment. Our bench work follows the basic safety rules as following:

          a. No food and drink in the lab.

          b. Wear rubber gloves and lab coat in all experiments.

          c. Bio-safety cabinet is required when using bacteria.

          d. Using UV-light to sterilize the lab every week.

          e. Turn off fire, electric heaters when leaving.

          f. Liquid waste and bioorganic waster must be sterilized

2.Mosquitoes Feeding Safety Rules

Our mosquitoes feeding experiment depends on the Key Laboratory of Biopesticide and Chemical Biology which is one of the best mosquito research labs in China. To keep experimenters and public safety, experimenters should follow the additional safety rules as following:

          a. Everyone should register before entering the feeding rooms.

b. Staff must practice protective measure before experiment.

          c. The feeding rooms must be sterilized if any mosquitoes escaped. The room will not be accessible until the 15-days disinfection is over.

          d. The feeding areas of Culex fatigans, Aedes aegypti and White albopictus must be separated and closed to ensure safety.

          e. The feeding areas of larvae and adults must be separated.

          f.  Seeking medical advice is required when stuff is bited.

4. Safety Rules of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii

Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a type of model organism in the genetic engineering filed. It has been proved that Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is safe for research. Meanwhile, we used the CC503 and FA479 strains which have no toxicity to any organisms.

The ultimate goal of our project is to use Chlamydomonas reinhardtii which can produce mosquito-larvicidal proteins in the natural environment to control mosquitoes. Considering the potential possibility of alga bloom, we decided to use CC503 strain which is cell wall deficient. The cell wall deficient strain can not survive for a long time. Because of it, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii amostly can not become the dominant population in the natural environment.

What’s more, BNU-CHINA team helped us to build the growth model of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii in the natural model. Based on the experiment of growth under the different conditions, we can predict the amount of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii after releasing in the natural environment.

In the future, we plan to add non-functional gene fragment tag to expression vector. We synthesis a particular DNA sequence which has no homology sequence in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Meanwhile, we design the corresponding primer about this sequence. The department of environment or any biology department can make use of PCR to detect the leak of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.